Appalachian Community Histories – Fort Gay, Wayne County: From the Forks and Cassville to a Big Sandy River Town
At the far western edge of Wayne County, West Virginia, Fort Gay sits where geography has always mattered. Across the water is Louisa, Kentucky. Beside the town flow the Tug Fork and the waters that become the Big Sandy River, a river system that once carried timber, farm goods, steamboats, mail, and travelers between the Appalachian interior and the Ohio Valley. Long before highways made the state line seem like a simple crossing, the rivers defined where people settled, how they traded, and which communities grew.
Fort Gay has carried several names during that long history. It was once known simply as the Forks. During the nineteenth century, it became Cassville. For years, Cassville and Fort Gay existed almost side by side as names, one appearing in municipal records while the other appeared in postal usage. Only in 1932 did Fort Gay become the town’s official name.
Behind those name changes is a history that reaches from colonial land grants and pioneer cabins to steamboats, timber merchants, newspapers, a lock and dam, the railroad, a bridge to Kentucky, and one of Wayne County’s most important early twentieth-century high schools. The surviving documentary record is unusually rich for a small Appalachian town, although some of the community’s oldest traditions require care, particularly claims involving George Washington and the first attempts at settlement.
The Forks and the Colonial Land Grants
The geography of Fort Gay was being written into land records before a permanent town existed. In December 1772, Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore issued what became known as the Savage Grant, more than 28,000 acres awarded to Captain John Savage and other veterans of the French and Indian War. Marshall University’s surviving records show that the boundary followed the Ohio and Big Sandy river system and extended up the Big Sandy to the Forks near present-day Fort Gay and Louisa. Later disputes over ownership eventually produced additional surveys and court proceedings, leaving an unusually detailed paper trail for the region.
A historical marker at Fort Gay preserves an older tradition that Charles Vancouver and ten companions attempted a settlement at the Forks in 1789 on land that had been surveyed in 1770 by John Fry for George Washington. The marker is important as evidence of the story that generations of local residents have been told, but the Washington connection should be stated carefully. The surviving Savage Grant records provide firm evidence that the lower Big Sandy was being surveyed, granted, divided, and contested during this period, but they do not justify the simpler claim sometimes repeated that Washington himself stood at present-day Fort Gay and personally surveyed the townsite.
The stronger documentary trail for permanent settlement begins near the end of the eighteenth century. A 1919 article in the Wayne County News, drawing on local historical memory, identified Samuel Short as the first settler and placed his cabin at the future site of Fort Gay around 1796. It said Robert Tabor followed and acquired a 2,500-acre tract in 1798. The same account listed Thomas Short, Samuel Hatten, William Adams, Peyton and Joseph Newman, John and Richard Grayson, Thomas Vaughan, Peter Loar, Benjamin Sperry, and William Artrip among the early settlers of Butler District.
The retrospective newspaper account is not the only evidence for Tabor. The Loar Family Collection at the West Virginia State Archives contains a Commonwealth of Virginia deed to Robert Tabor for land on the Big Sandy dated 1801. The collection also preserves an 1818 land warrant for John Ross and later surveys, deeds, tax receipts, business records, and correspondence. These records help move the story of early Fort Gay away from legend and into surviving documentary evidence.
Building a Community Along the Big Sandy
Early settlement followed the river valleys and creek bottoms. The same 1919 Wayne County News history described William Thompson constructing an early grist mill along Mill Creek and Solomon Perry operating a sawmill on Big Hurricane. It also placed a building used for schooling on Mill Creek in 1805 and identified Baptist and Methodist ministers among the earliest organizers of churches in the district. Because the newspaper was recording events that had happened more than a century earlier, exact details should be treated as local retrospective history, but the account provides a valuable picture of how residents remembered the district’s pioneer period.
The Big Sandy was the essential transportation corridor. Roads through the mountains developed slowly, while the river connected families and businesses with larger markets downstream. Steamboats eventually carried passengers, mail, manufactured goods, and agricultural products through the Big Sandy Valley, while timber could be assembled into rafts and floated toward the Ohio. The West Virginia Encyclopedia notes that steamboat traffic flourished from roughly the 1830s until the period before World War II and that landings, warehouses, and river commerce once lined both banks of the valley.
The Loar Family Collection gives that broader river history a local face. Harmon Loar and his family conducted business in Wayne County for much of the nineteenth century. Their records show hardware, food, seed, and agricultural products moving through the Big Sandy economy. Harmon Loar shipped farm products toward markets on the Ohio River and supplied local families with tools and manufactured goods brought back into the valley. He also participated in timber dealing, sawmilling, and land speculation. Surviving bills of lading and delivery receipts document both steamboat and later railroad transportation.
Even the ordinary records reveal how closely life at the Forks was connected to commerce. The archive contains tuition receipts from the 1840s and 1850s, timber orders from the 1870s and 1880s, customer accounts, land surveys, tax records, church material, and a Cassville Sunday School minute book covering December 1876 through October 1881. Fort Gay’s history survives not merely through major events but through the paperwork of people buying seed, paying tuition, shipping lumber, acquiring land, and organizing religious life.
From the Forks to Cassville
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the old geographical name of the Forks was giving way to Cassville. The National Register documentation for Fort Gay High School places the gradual adoption of Cassville around 1849 and connects the name with Lewis Cass of Michigan, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1848. Cass carried Virginia in that election and reportedly enjoyed strong support in Wayne County.
The same research identifies an 1852 Virginia-era incorporation, making Cassville the oldest incorporated town in Wayne County, followed by the need for reincorporation after West Virginia became a state in 1863. On November 13, 1875, Cassville was incorporated under West Virginia law and held its first municipal election. This distinction is important because later summaries sometimes describe 1875 as the town’s first incorporation, while the National Register research places an earlier incorporation in 1852.
A 1919 newspaper account named James H. Marcum as the first mayor after the 1875 incorporation, with John C. Romans serving as recorder and William H. Frasher, Samuel Short, Calahan Beaire, Stephen M. Marcum, and Wayne Ferguson serving as councilmen. That same account recalled a destructive 1883 fire that burned much of Cassville’s business section.
For several years Cassville also became an important center of Wayne County journalism. The Wayne Advocate, founded in the county in 1874, was published at Cassville from 1874 until 1880. The Library of Virginia’s newspaper bibliography describes it as the only newspaper then published in the Sandy Valley. It later returned to Wayne and eventually became part of the lineage of the Wayne County News.
That six-year publishing period is easy to overlook, but it places nineteenth-century Cassville within a larger regional network of politics, business, and communication. This was not merely a scattering of cabins along a river. By the years after the Civil War, it possessed municipal government, merchants, churches, schools, newspapers, and commercial connections that reached far beyond Wayne County.
Cassville, Fort Gay, and Two Names for One Town
One of the more interesting parts of Fort Gay’s history is that the modern name did not suddenly replace Cassville. For a period, the two names coexisted.
The evidence is particularly clear in federal and state records. The 1920 census recorded 617 residents in “Cassville town,” while identifying the post office as Fort Gay. The 1921 West Virginia Blue Book likewise listed “Cassville town (Fort Gay P. O.).” The municipal name and the postal identity were therefore different enough that government publications recorded both.
The National Register research suggests that postal use of Fort Gay gradually became more familiar than Cassville and that the older name lost relevance. By 1932, the town was officially recognized as Fort Gay.
The origin of the name itself remains less certain. Modern West Virginia state and municipal references say the name was connected with Fort Gallup, located on a hill at Louisa across the river before the Civil War. The National Register research is more cautious and specifically notes that the origin of “Fort Gay” is not entirely clear to local historians. The safest conclusion is that the name was already in common postal use before 1932 and was formally adopted that year, while the precise reason the name first came into use remains open to interpretation.
River Improvements, the Lock, and the Bridge to Louisa
As Cassville moved into the industrial era, the federal government was trying to make the Big Sandy a more dependable transportation route. Congress authorized a survey of the Big Sandy and its Tug and Levisa forks in 1874 as part of a wider effort to determine whether locks and dams could improve navigation. Eventually, a system of navigation structures operated along the river and its forks.
Fort Gay became part of that engineered river landscape. National Register research identifies work on the Big Sandy lock and dam system as one of the forces behind the town’s early twentieth-century economic growth, alongside lumbering and the railroad. A photograph preserved by the West Virginia State Archives shows children playing at the dam at Cassville, providing a rare visual record of a federal navigation project becoming part of everyday local scenery.
The relationship with Louisa was just as important. For much of the nineteenth century, crossing between the two communities depended on the river and ferry service. That began to change when the Louisa and Fort Gay Bridge Company sought permission to construct a bridge connecting Kentucky and West Virginia.
On March 3, 1905, Congress passed an act authorizing the company to erect, maintain, and operate a bridge across the Big Sandy River or its branches near Louisa. The law required plans to be submitted to the Secretary of War so the structure would not obstruct navigation. It also recognized the bridge as a lawful structure and post route, protected the movement of United States mail across it, and allowed telegraph and telephone companies rights of way.
The bridge did more than shorten a trip. It physically joined two communities that had long functioned as neighbors while belonging to different states. Fort Gay and Louisa shared a river economy, families, businesses, transportation routes, and schools, yet the water between them remained a real obstacle. The bridge transformed that relationship into a permanent land connection.
When the Railroad Changed the Town
While federal engineers worked on the river, the railroad was beginning to challenge the older transportation system altogether.
The Norfolk & Western extended its lines through the Big Sandy Valley as part of the railroad network linking Appalachian coal country with larger national markets. The West Virginia Encyclopedia notes that railroad construction along the Tug Fork and Big Sandy in the late nineteenth century opened the valley more effectively to coal development and gradually displaced much of the older river traffic.
For Cassville, the consequences were substantial. National Register research describes the community as becoming considerably busier after the Norfolk & Western extension, with the depot emerging as a center of town activity. Lumbering, railroad employment, construction, commerce, and the river improvements combined to produce a period of growth in the early twentieth century.
The demographic record reflects some of that expansion. Cassville’s population was recorded at 457 in 1910 and 617 in 1920, an increase of about 35 percent in only a decade. By 1930 the population had reached 664. Those numbers were never large by urban standards, but for a small Appalachian river town they represented meaningful growth, especially when accompanied by new transportation infrastructure and increasing demand for schools.
Schools Before Fort Gay High School
Education in the Fort Gay area changed dramatically between the pioneer period and the twentieth century.
In 1922, longtime Wayne County teacher Arabella Copley wrote a remarkable first-person account for the Wayne County News. Seventy-one years old and having taught for half a century, Copley remembered beginning her teaching career at sixteen in an old log Methodist church. Students sat on rough-hewn logs, books were scarce, and a few children used slates. Teachers worked with little of the professional structure that later generations would recognize.
Copley also remembered John Marcum teaching what she believed was the first school in Cassville. According to her recollection, the school occupied the back room of a store, and pupils sat on benches without desks. By 1922, she could contrast that experience with plans for a substantial modern school building in Fort Gay.
The educational history also included Fort Gay’s Black community. In 1922, historian Carter G. Woodson discussed African American education in Wayne County and specifically mentioned a Black school at Fort Gay. Woodson wrote that the small Black population, limited teacher salaries, and frequent changes in teachers created difficulties for the school. He nevertheless singled out Cora Brooks Smith, an Ironton High School graduate who taught there for several years, and Susie Woodson, a graduate of Douglass High School in Huntington, for recognition. Their presence adds an important chapter to Fort Gay’s educational history that can easily disappear from broader accounts centered only on the later high school.
Building Butler District High School
By the late 1920s, residents wanted a local high school that would spare students the difficult trip to Wayne. In an era before dependable school transportation, some students traveled miles on foot or horseback over mountain roads simply to continue their education.
Efforts to establish Butler District High School began in 1929. Legislation allowed the district to separate from the existing consolidated arrangement, and architect Levi Johnson Dean was hired to design a permanent school. During its first year, beginning in September 1929, classes met temporarily in a church and in the Knights of Pythias Lodge building.
In September 1931, a crowd gathered for the laying of the cornerstone of the permanent building. Marshall College president M. P. Shawkey spoke while the school orchestra performed. Contractor M. W. Zinne completed the building for approximately $32,000, and the new high school opened with ninety-six students in grades ten through twelve.
The building itself made a statement about the town. Dean designed it in a Beaux-Arts-influenced style with a symmetrical facade, prominent stone entrance portals, brickwork, and classical architectural details. In a small community surrounded by mountains and river bottoms, the school was deliberately monumental. Education was being given one of the most imposing buildings in town.
The timing was fitting. The permanent high school rose in 1931, and the following year Cassville officially became Fort Gay. The community entering the Depression era was therefore doing so with both a new civic landmark and a newly standardized municipal name.
Fort Gay High School and a Changing Wayne County
Fort Gay High School became one of the central institutions of the community for generations. Additions constructed in 1953 and 1957 expanded the building as educational needs changed. Despite those alterations, much of the original architectural character survived.
By the 1980s, however, population change and the rising cost of operating numerous schools were encouraging consolidation throughout West Virginia. Fort Gay High School and Crum High School were consolidated in 1987 to form Tolsia High School, also in the Fort Gay area. The old Fort Gay building subsequently served as a middle school before closing in 2013.
Its historical significance did not disappear with the students. The Fort Gay High School property was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places for its importance to the history of education and for its architecture. The nomination emphasized both the community movement that created a locally accessible high school and the work of architect Levi Johnson Dean.
The school therefore represents more than an old building. It marks the point at which residents of a relatively isolated Appalachian district demanded access to secondary education close to home and invested in a structure intended to show that the institution mattered.
A Town Shaped by Two Rivers and Two States
Fort Gay’s history cannot be separated neatly from Louisa, nor can it be understood only as a Wayne County story. The river placed the community on a state boundary, but it also connected the town to Kentucky. The same waterways that divided jurisdictions carried merchants, teachers, timber, agricultural products, mail, and passengers through a shared valley.
For much of the nineteenth century, residents knew the place as Cassville. At the same time, Fort Gay increasingly appeared as a postal and popular name. Riverboats gave way to railroads. Ferries gave way to a bridge. Small schools in churches and store rooms gave way to graded schools and eventually the imposing high school on Court Street. Timber merchants and farmers who once relied on the Big Sandy found themselves living beside railroad tracks tied to a national industrial economy.
Even the physical remains of that history tell the same story. Archival maps trace colonial claims along the river. Loar family ledgers record the movement of everyday goods. Newspaper files preserve the voices of teachers and local historians. Photographs show children at the dam. Congressional statutes document the bridge to Kentucky. Railroad drawings preserve Cassville and Fort Gay on the same transportation corridor. School records follow a community from pioneer education into the twentieth century.
Why Fort Gay’s History Matters
Fort Gay is the kind of Appalachian town that can appear small on a modern map while occupying a much larger place in the historical record. Its location at the Forks made it part of colonial land speculation before West Virginia existed. Its riverfront brought settlers, commerce, timber, steamboats, and federal navigation projects. Its position opposite Louisa tied it culturally and economically to Kentucky, while the railroad later drew it into the industrial network of the central Appalachian coalfields.
The town’s several names also reveal something about the way communities change. The Forks described geography. Cassville reflected nineteenth-century politics and municipal development. Fort Gay emerged from local and postal usage until it finally displaced the older name in 1932.
Yet the community itself endured beneath those labels.
The strongest history of Fort Gay is therefore not found in a single founding date or one colorful story about a famous surveyor. It is found in the accumulation of records left by generations of people who lived beside the Big Sandy. Land deeds, newspaper pages, account books, school minutes, bridge legislation, railroad maps, photographs, and census schedules show a town repeatedly adapting to new ways of traveling, working, learning, and communicating while remaining anchored to the same narrow piece of Appalachian river country.
Sources & Further Reading
Marshall University Special Collections. “Thomas J. Buffington Copy of Savage Land Grant Survey, circa 1816.” Marshall Digital Scholar. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://mds.marshall.edu/buffington_savage_land_grant/
Marshall University Special Collections. “Copy of the Savage Land Grant Map.” Marshall Digital Scholar. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://mds.marshall.edu/ts_maps/7/
Marshall University Special Collections. “Savage Grant Abstracts, 1754–1841.” Accession 1976/01.0124. Marshall Digital Scholar. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://mds.marshall.edu/sc_finding_aids/375/
Marshall University Special Collections. “Savage Grant Land Surveys and Huntington-Kenova Land Company Deeds, 1754–1889.” Accession 1989/04.0495. Marshall Digital Scholar. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://mds.marshall.edu/sc_finding_aids/394/
West Virginia State Archives. “Loar Family Collection, 1830–1939.” MS2013-097. West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/manuscripts/ms2013-097.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Commonwealth of Virginia Deed to Robert Tabor, Big Sandy River, 1801.” In Loar Family Collection, 1830–1939, MS2013-097. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/manuscripts/ms2013-097.html
West Virginia State Archives. “John Ross Land Warrant, 50 Acres on the Big Sandy River, 1818.” In Loar Family Collection, 1830–1939, MS2013-097. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/manuscripts/ms2013-097.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Cassville [Fort Gay] Sunday School Minute Book, December 10, 1876–October 2, 1881.” In Loar Family Collection, 1830–1939, MS2013-097. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/collections/manuscripts/ms2013-097.html
Wayne County News. “Squibs From Early History of District in This County.” December 4, 1919. West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/wcn/wcn191204.html
Copley, Arabella. “Wayne Woman Is 71 Years Old and Has Taught for Half a Century.” Wayne County News, July 27, 1922. West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn220727.html
Wayne County News. “The Early Newspapers.” January 15, 1925. West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn250115.html
Wayne County News. “Wayne County World War Memorial.” May 11, 1922. West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn220511.html
Wayne County News. “Civil War Veterans.” May 27, 1926. West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/History/wcn/wcn260527.html
Library of Virginia. “The Wayne Advocate.” Virginia Newspaper Bibliography. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?categories=West+Virginia+Newspapers&page=14
Library of Virginia. “The Wayne News.” Virginia Newspaper Bibliography. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?categories=West+Virginia+Newspapers&page=14
United States Congress. “An Act Authorizing the Louisa and Fort Gay Bridge Company, of Louisa, Kentucky, to Erect a Bridge Across the Tug and Levisa Forks of the Big Sandy River.” Public Law No. 184. March 3, 1905. United States Statutes at Large 33:1015–16. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-33/pdf/STATUTE-33-Pg1015.pdf
United States House of Representatives. Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. Louisa and Fort Gay Bridge Company: Report to Accompany H.R. 17935. January 31, 1905. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905. https://mocat.library.unt.edu/
United States Geological Survey. Spirit Leveling in West Virginia, 1909 and 1910. Bulletin 477. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911. https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0477/report.pdf
United States Geological Survey. “Louisa, Kentucky-West Virginia Quadrangle.” Historical Topographic Map Collection. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://www.usgs.gov/tools/topoview
United States Census Bureau. Census of Population and Housing: West Virginia. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce. https://www.census.gov/
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 1921. Charleston: Tribune Printing Company, 1921. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/WVS_Bluebook_1921.pdf
West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Blue Book, 2017–2018. Charleston: West Virginia Legislature, 2018. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/legisdocs/publications/bluebook/2017-2018/0943_WVS_BlueBook.pdf
Thornton, Isabel. Fort Gay High School, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. Charleston: West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, 2017. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
Wayne County Board of Education. “Meeting Minutes, January 25, 1930.” Cited in Fort Gay High School, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. 2017. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
Wayne County Board of Education. “Meeting Minutes, August 21, 1951.” Cited in Fort Gay High School, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. 2017. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
Lycan, L. L. “History of Fort Gay High School.” Unpublished manuscript, 1937. Cited in Fort Gay High School, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
Bowen, Shelia. Interview by Isabel Thornton. November 15, 2016. Cited in Fort Gay High School, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
Hatfield, Joetta. Interview by Isabel Thornton. November 15, 2016. Cited in Fort Gay High School, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
Thompson, Robert. Interview by Isabel Thornton. November 15, 2016. Cited in Fort Gay High School, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
Norfolk & Western Historical Society. “Big Sandy Line Right-of-Way Maps and Engineering Drawings.” Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=156376
Norfolk & Western Railway. “Drawing N-8268, Big Sandy/Naugatuck Branch Right-of-Way Map.” May 10, 1923. Norfolk & Western Historical Society Archives. https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=256592
West Virginia State Archives. “Children Playing at the Dam, Cassville (Fort Gay), Wayne County.” Frank Hammond Collection. West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/picoftheweek/picsoftheweek54.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Tolsia High School Yearbooks, Tolsia Pride, 1988–1992 and 2002.” West Virginia Archives and History. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/yearbooks.html
Library of Congress. Map of Western Virginia. 1862. Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/gvhs01.vhs00325/
West Virginia University, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Correspondence with J. R. Hall, Mayor of Fort Gay, 1973–1976.” West Virginia University Archives. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/244374
West Virginia University, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Correspondence with Arbie Branham, Mayor of Fort Gay, 1984–1988.” West Virginia University Archives. https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/90650
Woodson, Carter G. “Early Negro Education in West Virginia.” Journal of Negro History 7 (1922). Reproduced by West Virginia Archives and History. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/africanamericans/woodsoncarter02.html
Hardesty, H. H. & Co. Hardesty’s Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia: Maps and Histories of Wayne, Lincoln and Cabell Counties, West Virginia. New York: H. H. Hardesty & Co., 1884. https://books.google.com/books/about/Hardesty_s_Historical_and_Geographical_E.html?id=s7kM0gEACAAJ
Taylor, Mildred. History of Wayne County. Wayne, WV: Published by the author, 1963.
Lewis, Stephen. An Overview of the History of Wayne County. Wayne, WV, 1997.
Thompson, Robert M. Creating Cassville. 2016. Cited in the Fort Gay High School National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
Thompson, Robert M. Uphill Both Ways: A History of Wayne County Schools. 2016. Cited in the Fort Gay High School National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. https://wvculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fort-gay-high-school.pdf
Thompson, Robert M. Forging Fort Gay. 2019. See Marshall University’s Clio entry for Fort Gay High School. https://theclio.com/entry/88839
Massey, Tim R. “Wayne County.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Revised April 23, 2026. https://wvencyclopedia.org/entries/897 West Virginia Encyclopedia
Hartford, John. “Big Sandy River.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/455
Sutphin, Gerald W. “Locks and Dams.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://wvencyclopedia.org/entries/1379
“Tug Fork.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/754 West Virginia Encyclopedia
Wayne County Commission. “Wayne County’s History.” Accessed October 5, 2026. https://waynecountywv.org/
West Virginia State Archives. “Place Names in West Virginia: Cassville, Wayne County.” Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/archives/placenames/placnamc.html
West Virginia State Archives. “Districts and Place Names in West Virginia.” Accessed October 5, 2026. https://archive.wvculture.org/hiStory/communities/districtplacenames.html
Historical Marker Database. “Fort Gay Toll Bridge.” Accessed October 5, 2026. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=137334
Marshall University. “Fort Gay High School.” Clio: Your Guide to History. Accessed October 5, 2026. https://theclio.com/entry/88839
Author Note: Fort Gay is one of those Appalachian communities whose history becomes much larger once its surviving land records, newspapers, river documents, railroad maps, and school records are brought together. I was especially interested in tracing how the same place evolved from the Forks to Cassville and finally Fort Gay while remaining closely connected to Louisa and the Big Sandy River.